Cleveland native and Hollywood actress Patricia Heaton of Everybody Loves Raymond and The Middle once told a joke about pro football coach Paul Brown: “A football player died and went to heaven.
The joke slyly illustrates the enormous impact and legacy Paul Brown had on the game of football. Pre-Brown, it was characterized mostly by brute force, with little intellectual finesse. Brown’s genius for innovation transformed it into the mental and analytical game that it is today.
Do you like to hike? Emma Rowena Gatewood sure did.
Known for her minimalist, no-nonsense approach to hiking, Gatewood used a homemade sassafras walking stick to help steady her on the trail and carried a cloth sack slung over her shoulder, filled with only 18 pounds of food and equipment. Today’s hikers often carry twice that much weight if not more, and they do it with high-tech backpacks. Instead, she had the following advice for would-be AT hikers:
Did you hear that?” my daughter, Rosie, asks as we climb a wooden staircase in the Anchorage, a former mansion on the outskirts of Marietta, in southeastern Ohio. “It sounded like a low grumble.”
A healthy respect for the “other side” is well advised during a visit to Marietta, which dates to 1788 as the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory. History and hauntings go hand in hand here, as the city’s storied, well-preserved past provides ghosthunters a spooky year-round playground.
At the Tiffin Police and Fire All Patriots Memorial, a daylong observance occurs on each anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
The Tiffin memorial’s centerpiece is a 17.5-foot-long steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center. It weighs more than 3 tons and rests on a pentagon-shaped piece of granite that alludes to the strike on America’s military headquarters. Positioned at an angle of 9.11 degrees, the beam sits low to the ground so people can touch it. “When rust particles drop off that beam, they almost seem like tears,” observes Gosche.
Whenever merchandise manager Kate Fox welcomes tour bus groups to the J.M. Smucker Co. store and café, she asks visitors to guess Smucker’s first product. “Everyone always answers, ‘strawberry preserves,’” says Fox, “but the company actually started with apple butter.”
Located near U.S. 30, the store sits along a rural road in Wayne County just minutes away from the J.M. Smucker Company’s headquarters in Orrville. The town’s population is less than 10,000, yet it’s home to a Fortune 500 corporation with some 7,000 employees who work in offices and manufacturing facilities spread from Quebec to California. Why Orrville? In 1897, local farmer Jerome Monroe Smucker opened a cider mill there and began making apple butter from concentrated cider.
Wally Byam’s childhood was spent immersed in nature. He worked on a West Coast sheep farm, where he lived in a donkey-towed wagon that was outfitted with a stove, food, water, and just about everything else he could possibly need.
Byam’s love of camping and the outdoors, combined with American ingenuity, resulted in a product that lasts for decades and is instantly recognizable around the world.
Perhaps best of all, it’s made in Ohio — Byam moved the production to Jackson Center in rural Shelby County right after World War II, and workers there build upward of 120 of the iconic silver bullets every week, all by hand.
Ohio is the only state in the union with a burgee flag — a shape usually associated with a boating organization.
Shanties date to the mid-1400s era of tall ships, when sailors’ work was grueling and labor-intensive. The rhythms of the call-and-response style of shanty songs helped the crew push and pull, hoisting sails and hauling lines in a synchronized effort. Often adapted from familiar folk tunes and ballads of the day, shanty lyrics were flavored with nautical terms and names of places the sailors had been — or hoped to see. ]
Of the many paintings hanging in the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, the largest by far measures 22 feet long by 16 feet high and is titled The Signing of the Treaty of Green Ville.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, England ceded to the fledgling USA ownership of the Northwest Territory — an immense area north and west of the Ohio River that would one day become five states: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota.
The major problem with the agreement was that it completely ignored tens of thousands of indigenous people who were already living on that land — from dozens of major tribes — who were not about to give up their claims on the land without a fight.
In the United States, the golden age of carousels lasted roughly from 1880 to 1925 and generated more than 3,000 of the enchantingly colorful and musical rides — of which only about 150 have survived.
Amusement parks often brag about possessing one classic carousel, so how special is it that Cedar Point owns three? Built in 1912, the Midway Carousel (shown at left) is Cedar Point’s oldest operating ride. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places and offers 60 horses that are rare examples of master carver Daniel Muller’s handiwork.
Tucked off County Road 658 in Ashland County, not far from the northward-flowing Vermillion River, a squat, knobby tree stump sits near a modest white farmhouse.
Folklore paints Johnny Appleseed as an eccentric nature lover, scattering apple seeds while wandering barefoot and wearing a tin pot as a hat. While he was a devout conservationist, he was also a calculating and successful orchardist whose passion sprang from a blend of religious devotion, humanitarianism, and strategic economic thought.
